Diablo 3 Banhammer Dropped Just Before RMAH Goes Live

eldavojohn writes "One thing Diablo 3 has that many other games do not is a 'Real Money Auction House' (RMAH), which went live today for players with two factor authentication. Of course, mere hours before that, Blizzard publicly announced they would follow through on their promises. Accounts they have identified as cheaters and botters have been banned 'by the thousands.' No official number is out, but the news is indicating that as people get off of work and return home to their bot-wives and bot-kids they may find themselves without a valid Battle.net account (possibly tied to other games like SCII and WoW). Blizzard has also included many fixes to remove/dissuade many other exploits but if their past arcane attitude toward the 'gamers of the game' is any indication, thousands will be unhappy."

Comments

That's *it* for me and Blizzard, man!!

[crazyjj]

Many a scorned Blizzard fan will wail away on the message boards over this, I'm sure. But hearing a Blizzard fan say "I've had it with them this time!" is like listening to a crack whore bitch about her dealer. She'll rant all day, but you just know by that night she'll be crawling back, offering to suck dick for more.

Re:That's *it* for me and Blizzard, man!!

[h4rr4r]

I have not yet bought diablo 3 and probably never will. Single player games do not need online access. Nor do I want to support that model.

Re:That's *it* for me and Blizzard, man!!

[h4rr4r]

It has a single player mode.

If it was only multiplayer that would be even less reason for me to play it.

Re:That's *it* for me and Blizzard, man!!

[Anonymous Coward]

It does not have single player "mode". That is a misconception. The game is explicitly multiplayer with the option to play alone if desired. At any time in a solo adventure you can invite others to join you. Claiming diablo3 is a single player game is like claiming world of warcraft is a single player game.

Yes, you can play solo, but that is not the intention of how the game is supposed to be played.

Re:That's *it* for me and Blizzard, man!!

[cheekyjohnson]

Yes, you can play solo, but that is not the intention of how the game is supposed to be played.

It does not matter how they intended the game to be played. What matters is how the player (the one who actually owns the game) wishes to play it, and there happens to be a single player made (playing alone, single player mode, whatever you wish to call it).

Re:That's *it* for me and Blizzard, man!!

[cheekyjohnson]

No, but I'm a member of a fairly large community of hackers, none of whom have ever had any keys unrightly banned.

This is about false positives, not about actual cheaters getting banned. Even if 100% of cheaters got banned, that would not mean that no innocents got banned.

Re:That's *it* for me and Blizzard, man!!

[JonySuede]

steam->restart offline

Re:That's *it* for me and Blizzard, man!!

[Dahamma]

You are both just being pedantic, really.

But to contribute to the pedantry... a "mode" in a software program is generally an explicitly configured state of the application. Your usage is really just talking about a style of playing the game. It's a multiplayer game with N players where N can be from 1-4.

You could start calling a wolf a big mean shaggy dog if you want, but don't expect people to agree with you or take you seriously in a discussion about dog breeds. Or you could reply to my post in ALL CAPS, BUT THAT'S JUST A STYLE OF TYPING AND NOT A MODE OF SLASHDOT ;)

Re:That's *it* for me and Blizzard, man!!

[mrchaotica]

or, or, or...

You missed the three most important reasons: because Blizzard has violated your property rights by performing a technological end-run around the First Sale Doctrine, because your property will eventually evaporate when (not if) Blizzard turns the servers off, and because Blizzard has stolen it from it's rightful eventual place in the Public Domain.

Re:That's *it* for me and Blizzard, man!!

[Mortimer82]

With your use of swear words and capital letters, it's not unreasonable for one to question the rationality of your statements, however, for the benefit of other readers I will say a little more on this.

Even if one were to ignore the difficulty of an employee dealing with all the internal measures against them doing such a thing, there isn't a good enough financial incentive for them to risk a job doing it. No support is outsourced, and as a first world employee, the amount of money they could get from this doesn't even remotely justify the risk to their job. Gold selling in WoW is very low margins making it only worthwhile to third world citizens.

When I left, there were no notification emails for an account being reactivated, as such, unless a friend questions you through other means about being online, you would not be aware your account was activated. Gold sellers use phishing sites, malware and engage an array of other criminal behaviour to hack accounts, as such they are not fussed to use fraudulent credit card details to add game time or even make use of any other scheme they can to get game time on an inactive account.

An experience of a small group of friends does not make a global pattern, wow has millions of players, there is a staggering amount of coincidence as a result. Also, if you and a friend visit some common website which had their password database hacked, then that could very well explain why both of you got hacked around the same time.

Generally, only big companies which have personal details or credit card data actually notify their users of security breaches, a little fan site which only has your email address and password might not even know they got owned, never mind actually tell their users if they found out.

Compromised accounts are nothing but bad news for Blizzard who loses customers, and thus revenue, as a result of them. It is worth it for them to do everything they can to prevent compromises, they have a serious financial motivation for doing so. It doesn't pay Blizzard to be ignorant on their security, it would cost them way more in terms of lost revenue than spending the money to be doing everything they can to keep their side secure.

With the above in mind, what is more likely, there was a failure with Blizzard, or that your username and password combination was unfortunately leaked into the into the hands of hackers.

No one is infallible, not me, not Blizzard and not *you*. However, once one considers how much compromised accounts cost Blizzard, then the only options become that either there really is a somewhat irrational conspiracy and Blizzard is to blame for your compromise, or the more reasonable explanation is that the compromise was completely external of Blizzard.

Re:That's *it* for me and Blizzard, man!!

[mr_gorkajuice]

No, it does not. There's only one game mode, and it's multiplayer. However, unless making your game public, only friends may join your game, and you have a checkbox option that prevents even them from entering without explicit consent. But "single player mode" doesn't exist. My girlfriend has been playing "single player" all along, untill she needed help beating some boss, at which point I simply clicked the "join" button from my friend list, and poof - there I was, in her "single player game". Why is that possible? Because it was always a multiplayer game. She was just the only person in it.

Huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Blizzard has also included many fixes to remove/dissuade many other exploits but if their past arcane attitude toward the 'gamers of the game' is any indication, thousands will be unhappy"

So they should keep thousands of cheating douchebags happy at the expense of hundreds of thousands/millions of good paying customers who are trying to have a good time?

Re:Huh?

[lgw]

*marks off the "It's in the game so it's not cheating!" square.

The rules of the game are the game software, unless Blizzard goes out of their way to make it clear where they diverge. It's kind of the point of these games, after all, that you try whatever the game software allows to solve problems.

Re:Haha

[spire3661]

It began the day they merged with Activision.

Re:Awesome!

[SuricouRaven]

Running a second server set would be expensive. Easier to just rig the random number generator so all they end up farming is an endless stream of worthless bottom-tier loot, and can be defeated in combat by even a new character with ease. Thus they add a new sport: Whack-a-bot.

I'm a Diabo 3 hipster...

[AdamTrace]

I liked Diablo 3 before it was cool to hate it.

Seriously, you all go ahead and not play. Make your protest and stand up and shout about how lame it is that you need to be online. The rest of us (or maybe it's just me and my friends) are having a TON of fun playing.

If you don't like it, that's fine. But don't tell me that *I* don't like it. 'Cause I do.